David DiSalvo is the author of "Brain Changer: How Harnessing Your Brain’s Power to Adapt Can Change Your Life" and the best-selling "What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite", which has been published in 10 languages. His work has appeared in Scientific American Mind, Forbes, Time, Psychology Today, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Salon, Esquire, Mental Floss and other publications, and he’s the writer behind the widely read science and technology blogs “Neuropsyched” at Forbes and “Neuronarrative” at Psychology Today. He can be found on Twitter @neuronarrative and at his website, daviddisalvo.org. Contact him at: disalvowrites [at] gmail.com.

Study: Holding a Gun Influences You to Think Others are Armed

If you’ve been following the news about Trayvon Martin, the unarmed teen who was shot and killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer claiming he acted in self defense, you may be wondering why the man thought the teen was armed. The 17-year old evidently had nothing in his hands except a bag of skittles and a can of ice tea. He never brandished a weapon of any sort, gun or otherwise.

Researchers at the University of Notre Dame may have uncovered the answer: their research suggests that holding a gun influences you to think others have a gun, too.

In five experiments, subjects were shown multiple images of people on a computer screen and were asked to determine whether the person was holding a gun or a neutral object such as a soda can or cell phone. Subjects did this while holding either a toy gun or a neutral object, such as a foam ball. When they thought the person on screen was holding a gun, they pressed a button indicating “gun present.”

The researchers varied the situation in each experiment; the people on screen sometimes wore ski masks, or were of a different race, or looked different in another conspicuous way to ensure that observers weren’t focusing on any one trait. Regardless of the situation or differences in appearance, the study showed that holding a gun biased observers to report “gun present” significantly more than they did when holding a neutral object.

“Beliefs, expectations, and emotions can all influence an observer’s ability to detect and to categorize objects as guns,” according to Dr. James Brockmole, who led the study. “Now we know that a person’s ability to act in certain ways can bias their recognition of objects as well, and in dramatic ways. It seems that people have a hard time separating their thoughts about what they perceive and their thoughts about how they can or should act.”

This result is consistent with a growing wealth of psychology literature on “embodied cognition,” the theory that the weight, texture, shape, distance, and other physical attributes of objects unconsciously influence our thinking and behavior. In this case, it appears that holding a gun influenced the subjects’ judgment significantly enough that, in a real-life scenario, they may be more prone to react defensively against a perceived threat that isn’t really there.

The study also shows that the ability to act on such a defensive impulse is a key factor. When researchers simply showed the subjects a nearby gun, instead of allowing them to hold it, the same result wasn’t observed.

“One reason we supposed that wielding a firearm might influence object categorization stems from previous research in this area which argues that people perceive the spatial properties of their surrounding environment in terms of their ability to perform an intended action,” Brockmole says.

Brockmole points out that other research has shown that people with broader shoulders tend to perceive doorways to be narrower, and softball players with higher batting averages perceive the ball to be bigger. “The blending of perception and action representations could explain, in part, why people holding a gun would tend to assume others are as well.”

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This is a possession-based outcome of a common psychological bias, the false consensus effect.

“In psychology, the false consensus effect is a cognitive bias whereby a person tends to overestimate how much other people agree with him or her. There is a tendency for people to assume that their own opinions, beliefs, preferences, values and habits are ‘normal’ and that others also think the same way that they do.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect

Which should not be taken as a counter-argument against the embodied cognition model; the false consensus effect itself is likely a product of embodied cognition. Believing that opinions and objects are a part of you, an intrinsic aspect rather than an environmental influence, increases the likelihood that you will think that other people also have those opinions and objects.

It is also why Andrew Stanton was blind to the fact that most people don’t know and don’t care about John Carter.